Zuckerberg reveals details of new Fwd.us political action committee

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today revealed the name – Fwd.us – and focus – immigration reform – of a new political action committee that is backed by a galaxy of Silicon Valley tech stars.

As reported last month by Chronicle senior political writer Carla Marinucci, the new super PAC is headed by Zuckerberg’s old Harvard roommate, Joe Green, who founded Causes.

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Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle

But details, even the name of the group, were held close to the vest until the Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Zuckerberg, who said Fwd.us will be a bi-partisan effort focused on immigration reform. (Post CEO Donald Graham is on Facebook’s board of directors.)

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

“The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. Many of these resources were zero-sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. There were only so many oil fields, and only so much wealth could be created from them.”

“Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.”

In addition to Zuckerberg, the founders of Fwd.us are noted Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists:

Aditya Agarwal, Dropbox vice president of engineering; Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel Partners; Benchmark General Partner Matt Cohler; angel investor Ron Conway; John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; LinkedIn co-founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman; Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston; PayPal co-founder and Yelp Chairman Max Levchin; Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of the Social+Capital Partnership and an owner/director of the Golden State Warriors; and Ruchi Sanghvi, Dropbox vice president of operations, who has this video on the site.

And there’s a long list of “major contributors,” including these Silicon Valley luminaries: